Git Features – When and How to Use Advanced Git Features

TL;DR: your git workflow isn't really the problem. The problem is that you need more, smaller iterations on the features you put in your topical branches. This will reduce the pain of keeping these topical branches up-to-date and integrating them into the upstream.

You definitely want to keep unmerged branches up-to-date with the changes in their upstream, and rebasing is generally the correct way to do this.

Your comment that "sometimes a feature is bigger than what a branch should be" leads me to believe that you have long-running topical branches that you find difficult to integrate with your integration branch. This, in my experience, is the actual root of your pain.

Imagine if your topical branches lasted a few hours and then were merged back in to the integration branch. These ephemeral branches are likely to be trivial to keep up-to-date and trivial to merge back into your integration branch. On the other hand, imagine a long-running topical branch that spans multiple releases of the software without integration. It would probably be quite difficult to integrate. This should lead you to conclude that short-running topical branches that are frequently rebased against master are easier to work with.

The question, then, becomes "why would features be bigger than what a branch should be?" This is probably because you're trying to do too much at once. The best way to keep topical branches short-lived and to make integration painless is to work in an iterative fashion where the minimum marketable feature is ruthlessly hewn down to its bare essentials and further work on that feature is added on in separate increments.

Also, are there any particular practices that I need to start doing in anticipation of adding others to my projects in the future?

Of course. There is a simple good practice that you can use even if you don't have a team right now: create a separated branch for development. The idea is that master branch will contain only released code versions or major changes. This can be adopted easily by new developers that join your project.

Besides, branching is useful even if you are working solo. For instance, you find a bug while in the process of coding a new feature. If you don't use branches, you will have to do both: add new features and fix the bug in the same branch. This is not good :P On the other hand, if you had created a new branch for creating your new feature, you can just checkout the development branch, fix the bug, and checkout back the new feature branch.

This is just a brief example of what you can do being a sole programmer. I am sure there must be more good practices.

I highly recommend you this article: A successful Git branching model